There are two reasons why smooth surfaces like tiles have less friction than coarse surfaces like asphalt. The first reason is Newton's third law of motion. This law states for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Anywhere objects collide, Newton's third law ensures that friction forces are at play.
How strong a friction force is partially depends on how fine or coarse the surfaces are. Materials like asphalt are so coarse you can see ridges and valleys in the material with your naked eye. Materials like glass feel smooth, but have tiny ridges and valleys on the molecular level. As these hills and valleys come into contact with the hills on another surface, they have to push over each other. The steeper the hills, the more friction force is involved.
But friction isn't primarily caused by surface roughness, which brings us to the second reason. Friction mostly occurs because of what are called weak electromagnetic forces. These are the forces of attraction and repulsion between charged particles, and they mostly dictate the strength of friction forces. On the atomic level, nothing is truly coming into contact. Particles are merely repulsing and attracting other particles, depending on how many charged, neutral, and uncharged particles can come into contact.
This is why smooth objects like rubber can still be great for producing friction; their chemical structure promotes electromagnetic forces. In other words, their surface has more contact with other surfaces on the atomic level.
http://physics.bu.edu/~duffy/py105/Friction.html
Sunday, October 11, 2015
What are the molecular reasons that a smooth surface like Tiles have less friction than surfaces like asphalt with a material like rubber?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why is the fact that the Americans are helping the Russians important?
In the late author Tom Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the assistance rendered to the Russians by the United States is impor...
-
There are a plethora of rules that Jonas and the other citizens must follow. Again, page numbers will vary given the edition of the book tha...
-
The poem contrasts the nighttime, imaginative world of a child with his daytime, prosaic world. In the first stanza, the child, on going to ...
-
The given two points of the exponential function are (2,24) and (3,144). To determine the exponential function y=ab^x plug-in the given x an...
-
The play Duchess of Malfi is named after the character and real life historical tragic figure of Duchess of Malfi who was the regent of the ...
-
The only example of simile in "The Lottery"—and a particularly weak one at that—is when Mrs. Hutchinson taps Mrs. Delacroix on the...
-
Hello! This expression is already a sum of two numbers, sin(32) and sin(54). Probably you want or express it as a product, or as an expressi...
-
Macbeth is reflecting on the Weird Sisters' prophecy and its astonishing accuracy. The witches were totally correct in predicting that M...
No comments:
Post a Comment